Portable electronic devices have become ubiquitous in modern society, providing a wide array of functions and uses. While consumers have widely adopted mobile telephones, personal digital assistants, portable music players, and other such devices, the current direction of technology is towards a convergence of function into a single device. Regardless of the type of device, the nearly continually increasing storage capacity for such devices enables users to store very large amounts of media content such as visual and audio content (e.g., images, music, and videos) to their mobile phones or other small screen devices. However, the sheer amount of content able to be stored often can exceed the ability of the device and user to efficiently locate, access, and use the content.
Conventional devices have attempted to provide some organization of visual content. The content can be organized and presented to the user with a hierarchical or non-hierarchical user interface (UI). However, to reduce the number of content items presented to the user in any given user interface view, it is often beneficial to use a hierarchical presentation with two or more levels. Conventional devices often utilize a hierarchical design, whereby items are organized in nodes as part of a tree. Such a hierarchical data structure comprises a root node and may have additional nodes (child nodes) stemming therefrom. All of the children of the same node are called siblings. A node without any children is referred to as a leaf, and a node having children is referred to as a non-leaf node. In some prior art devices, the visual content is contained in the node. Thus, nodes are themselves organizable under other nodes, either alone or with other nodes or media content.
Whenever content is presented hierarchically it is necessary to characterize each non-leaf node in the hierarchy so that the user can understand which items can be found under each node. This characterization is typically done visually and can be done, e.g. using the thumbnail of one file that belongs under a specific node in the hierarchical presentation. Alternatively, a node in the hierarchy can be characterized by a textual explanation, e.g. “April 2005” for a node containing images and videos captured in April 2005, or a combination of visual and textual representation.
However, conventional devices and systems have at least one significant problem: whenever a group of files is characterized in a hierarchical presentation, it is difficult to select the best possible representation of the group (e.g. a thumbnail) that would allow the user to understand/remember what content is actually contained inside the group.
A first group of conventional systems utilize a visual image of the visual content. In one such system, a single thumbnail represents a group of files. Typically, the thumbnail of the first (oldest) file in the group is shown automatically. In some cases, (e.g. in Adobe Photoshop Album) the user is also able to select the presented thumbnail manually. Another system uses more than one thumbnail to represent a group of files. Typically, the thumbnails of the first files in the group is shown. FIGS. 1(a) through 1(c) represent examples of conventional designs.
A second group of conventional systems utilize textual representation, such as a folder name or metadata describing a node in metadata based hierarchy is also used by some prior art systems.
A third group of conventional systems use a combination of textual and visual representation. For example, FIGS. 2(a) and 2(b) illustrates a screenshot taken from the Nokia Albums®2.0 SERIES 60 application. FIG. 2(a) shows a screen where a user selects a textual representation (i.e. month and year) and then in FIG. 2(b) the application shows groups of files that each represent one day when images or videos were captured. The month groups are characterized textually, and the day groups are characterized with a combination of textual and visual thumbnail presentations. In this case, the thumbnail is automatically selected to be the oldest file in each day group.
In addition, some conventional systems utilize more advanced visual displays representing the visual content. Video thumbnails are typically created by selecting the first or another frame from the beginning of a video. Microsoft Windows Xp® also supports dynamic video thumbnails so that, if the user focuses a video thumbnail, the video starts to play in thumbnail size. In addition, some DVD players are able to show dynamic small size video “thumbnails” that are actually small boxes that play a scene of a movie. Several scenes can be played simultaneously.
Although there are numerous ways to show a representative file on a graphical user interface, there remains a need for a method and device allowing for the selection of the visual and/or textual characterization for specific visual content in a hierarchical presentation in order to provide a user with sufficient information regarding the content within the node.